In retail store facilities, sales are consummated typically at a “point-of-sale” or “checkout” station. It is here that a customer makes payment to the retailer in exchange for items of merchandise obtained from the store's sales floor. The checkout process is often administered by an attendant (e.g., a sales associate or cashier) responsible for itemizing the merchandise, calculating a total price, presenting it to the customer, and receiving and/or recording the customer's payment.
To improve efficiency, several retailers have lately been installing “self-service” checkout stations, which—through the use of computer terminals equipped with bar code scanners, scales, and automated payment devices—enable customers to checkout their merchandise themselves. Since a single store associate can monitor several such self-service checkout stations at one time, a retailer can “open” more queues, shorten checkout lines, reduce wait times, and increase customer throughput.
In a drive to attain even further efficiency, retailer are now beginning to investigate and adopt so-called “mobile checkout” systems. In such systems, a mobile device with scanning capabilities (such as a smartphone) is used by a customer while shopping to scan items as they are retrieved and deposited into the customer's shopping cart. When the customer has finished shopping, the mobile device is brought to a checkout station, where information captured from the device, having been extracted at that point or earlier, is used to consummate the purchase quickly, without having to undergo additional item tabulation and/or scanning.
While the technical sophistication of retail checkout processes continues to evolve, it is well understood that any advantages attainable through such improvements will be limited naturally by customer adoption rates. Accordingly, the investigation into novel features that would be attractive to customer and that could be used in combination with modern electronic checkout systems continues to be an area of interest among retailers.